You’ve probably heard of phone sex operators: you ring up a number, they do some dirty talking, and then they bill you some outrageous amount because it took you half an hour. Turns out, lasting a long time isn’t exactly ideal when they charge per minute.
Phone sex preferences differ from person to person, making it a challenge for artificial intelligence — despite excelling in predicting human behavior. As difficult as it seems to predict these behaviors, the Machine Learning Group (MLG) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been working on a bot that is able to predict human sexual desires based off a few simple questions given at the start of the call. By asking questions like “Are you a top or a bottom,” “Are you into butt stuff,” and “What’s your mother’s maiden name,” these bots are able to determine the best way to please customers.
In doing this, the future of phone sex operators is revolutionized. Not only are jobs being taken away from full-time office workers and college students, but the prices of these calls are expected to drop tremendously. “The goal of this entire project,” says Tomas “Neo” Anderson, a member of MLG, “is to first put all of the current companies out of business through our low prices, and then we’ll jack them up super high to monopolize. It’s not like we have to pay our workers, they’re frickin’ robots.”
Anderson and his colleagues built the robot to learn through experience. The machine relies on several complicated algorithms to predict how a customer is likely to react to situations. In preparation for their future business, MLG has launched a prototype bot that implements physical interactions as well. Students at MIT are able to use this robot free of charge and at their own discretion — video documentation is provided to MLG, for research purposes.
The robot is able to adapt to the user through the process of machine learning; although the MLG students had to give it some basic information first. They told it that the goal was to make the customer stay on the phone as long as possible while still keeping them satisfied, but everything else was autonomous. “It decides which words provide the most sexual pleasure, which words can make the customer imagine the most intense fantasy, and how to get a customer to keep calling back,” says MLG advisor Melon Eusk. “It also gives each phone number a unique ID called a ‘Caller Identification Number,’ or ‘Caller IN’ for short. In doing this, it can help track specific peoples’ desires to make their returning visits as pleasing as possible.”
But don’t worry about this robot making your sex life nonexistent. Eusk says that the contraption is meant to be a supplement to sex, not a replacement. “While our current technology has the capability to do better than you in bed, our goal isn’t to make your partner leave you for a robot — at least not yet.”
